(b Como, 30 April 1888; d Monte Hermada, Gorizia, 10 Oct 1916). Italian architect and draughtsman. He attended the technical school at Como and moved to Milan in 1905, where he worked as a draughtsman for the Villoresi canal company and for the municipal engineering department, which was working on dams, hydro-electric plants, service networks and other infrastructures for Milan, the new industrial metropolis. In 1909 he enrolled at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan but graduated as an architect in 1912 from the Accademia di Belle Arti in Bologna. He came into contact with Symbolist and decadent artistic culture, with Giovanni Segantini's Divisionism, but above all with the Munich, Berlin and Vienna Secessions. With his friend, the sculptor Gerolamo Fontana, he may have visited the Klimt Room designed by Josef Hoffmann at the Venice Biennale of 1910, and he certainly owned several issues of the review Die Wagner Schule with photographs of sketches for monumental buildings by Emil Hoppe and Otto Sch?nthal. In 1910 he designed the plan for the villino moderno for the competition organized by the Milanino cooperative, which was published in the review La citt?-giardino. The stile floreale Villa Elisi (1910-11) in S Maurizio, Brunate, Como, for the industrialist Romeo Longatti, followed; it was decorated in collaboration with Fontana, and it combines the picturesque and the regional with the horizontal compositions of Sommaruga, with the influence of Klimt in the pediment. Drawings of this period, in the collections of Fontana (Como, Banca Popolare di Lecco) and of Luigi Pellini in Milan, show his development into decoration in the Viennese manner, drawn in the style of Franz von Stuck using white lead and gold in the Study for a Cemetery Building (1911-12). In 1912 Sant'Elia and Italo Paternoster took part in the competition for cemetery buildings at Monza; a perspective drawing (Como, Mus. Civ. Stor. Garibaldi) depicts a building influenced by Sommaruga's Faccanoni Mausoleum at Sarnico (1907-8), while the graphic rendering of the clouds in the drawing is reminiscent of Edvard Munch. His graduation project at Bologna (1912) was on the theme of monumental cathedrals, approached in his drawings by long flights of steps in the manner of the Wagnerschule, a theme used frequently for the models of monuments in the German reviews.
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